How to pronounce the trickiest English words

Try to read The Chaos aloud to demonstrate that you, too, do not know how to pronounce English: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Just as an example, did you know that the placement of a comma can change the pronunciation of a word? It can, and that poem has an example where it does!

A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin).

One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics

As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner.

Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks")

Ils / elles parlent ("they speak")

Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural.

Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.

Which is where, exactly. It is not obvious :)

>has original sins coming frome its parents

Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess. And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English. Where an "a" is more often than not an "e" (or even an "o" like in "ball"). Where an "e" is usually an "i". Where an "i" is pronounced as if it had an "a" in front of it, and where "u" for some fucked up reason has a "y" or "j" in front of it. Granted, "o" is fine as long as you don't double it ("oo") and it becomes an "u". And that's regular British English. American English makes things even worse.

English is more like Visual Basic.